After all the Snowden revelations about PRISM and other programs that the NSA and other government agencies amass personal information about every person on the planet, the US Cloud Providers took a hit, especially in Europe, where the privacy laws actually have teeth.

We get that behind us (a little) just in time for a federal judge in US District Court to rule that Microsoft must comply with a US warrant for customer data despite that data being stored in a company data center in Ireland! [techrepublic]

Windstream got the endorsement of the IRS to transfer their assets - copper and fiber plant - to a REIT and lease those assets back to the telecom corporation. In the process, Windstream will save a ton on taxes. That's awesome.

If it flies, the other ILECs - ATT, C-Link, VZ - will be right behind them.

I received the rather sporadic newsletter from Mammoth Networks today. While reading it, I noticed that the evolution of Mammoth is very similar to many other ISPs.

"Like most early adopters of broadband, Mammoth Networks started with DSL as our only product. We focused our efforts from 2005 to 2009 on our DSL and ATM platform, sprinkling T1s into the network at times."

"MarketsandMarkets forecasts the Unified Communication as-a-service (UCaaS) market to grow from $13.10 billion in 2014 to $23.34 billion in 2019. This represents a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 12.2% from 2014 to 2019." Those are some pretty specific numbers.

What goes on in my personal and business life usually shows up in my writing. These past couple of weeks have been stressful. Last night and this morning, Zig Ziglar has been stuck in my head. His Attitude of Gratitude.

"If the industry as a whole knew how awesome your product was--if they really understood all the differentiating features and the benefits of using it--would they still get behind it? Would sales people actively sell it? Would customers be lining up to buy it?"